Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Best and Worst of WWF Capital Carnage, the UK-only pay-per-view from 1998. The show’s poster depicts The Undertaker wearing a Kane t-shirt and D-Generation X burning down the Palace of Westminster, so you know it’s got to be good! They always save the cool stuff for England, right? Right?

Best: Tiger Ali Singh defeated Edge

…proving that wins and losses in professional wrestling mean absolutely f**king nothing! Unless you’re Chicky Starr or Victor The Bodyguard, losing to Tiger Ali Singh should automatically disqualify you from professional wrestling forever.

Worst: The Headbangers pinning The Legion of Doom in three minutes

Eesh. Okay, they mean something sometimes.

You know what? This show has a Triple H versus Jeff Jarrett match on it near the end, and if I’m going to review that I should just do the Best and Worst of Chugging Drāno. Let’s just cover WWE Capitol Punishment instead.

Between Cleveland and Austin I spent about five months living in Bethesda, Maryland, which is literally just down the street from Washington, D.C. The Verizon Center is where I got two nonconsecutive pictures taken with Slapshot the Eagle and sat front row to watch the Caps come back from a 4-1 deficit to beat the Habs 6-5 in playoffs overtime. And, uh, as far as I remember, that was the end of the playoffs and nothing happened after it.

Anyway, I think if a pro wrestling company decides they want a themed event (such as Anarchy Championship Wrestling’s prom or CZW’s ‘Family Dollar employees stab each other with bulb shards’) they should go all the way. I appreciate Washington-area iconography, and could just picture Randy Orton forearming Christina in the chest 400 times in a row on the White House front lawn, while tourists in FBI shirts circled by on Segways. And then fell asleep and wrecked their Segways. And then Obama did breakdancing!

Worst: Kofi and Dolph Aren’t Going Anywhere

There was a moment during the show opener when the announcers mentioned how Kofi Kingston is always watching tapes of “the legendary Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels”, and all I could think was “which parts?” He should watch the parts about upward mobility and how to hit your finisher when you’ve come up with a big pre-finisher ritual. Seriously, how many times has Kingston actually hit Trouble in Paradise when he’s been standing in the corner clapping his hands, yelling “boom”? Close the deal, Kofi.

But yeah, Kofi and Dolph have good matches, but they aren’t going anywhere. Keep in mind that this exact same match opened Summerslam 2010 and neither guy has changed or moved on since then. Dolph got a haircut and won a World Championship (apparently), but if you watched this match without watching the ten-month in-between you’d have no idea of either. Kofi has done even less. The last time Kofi grew as a character was when he got outed for being a fake Jamaican. Getting new trunks that look like your old trunks isn’t character development, it’s what baseball teams do when they want to get people to buy their gear without paying good baseball players. YOU ARE THE BALTIMORE ORIOLES, KOFI KINGSTON.

If this match opens a show next year, we might as well put them in a crate and mail them back to OVW.

Worst: Rating Matches

Before I get too deep into this Best and Worst, I have to mention that I am dramatically opposed to Internet interpretation of pro wrestling events. That sounds hypocritical, sure, because I’m interpreting the wrestling on the Internet, but my opinions tend to differ from the coagulated masses and I flake out on most of their conventions. The most obvious is that I don’t give star ratings to matches. I’m not Scott Keith. The closest I ever came was giving an arbitrary number of Hulk Hogan Pastamania images to matches during my fill-ins at DDT Digest. I think match ratings are dumb, especially when they’re done by people like this guy on the right, randomly deciding that Kingston/Ziggler 850 deserved three-and-a-quarter stars like some pro graps celebrity Star Search judge to fill out the description section of his YouTube videos when he should really somewhere washing his f**king face.

If you rate matches on the Internet, I urge you to stop. Yes, I know Christian can “work boaf hull and face” and I understand why that might bump up the rating by half a star, but Jesus, I feel bad saying things are “best” and “worst” sometimes, I don’t know how you can live with yourself if you’ve got a points system with precedent. Unless I start making you pay for a newsletter you won’t read anything more declarative from me than “I liked this” or “this sucked”, because what am I, a gymnastics judge?

“shave her little burgeoning mohawk and pay her thousands of dollars to spear the water bra off of Kelly Kelly once a week.”

If the WWE isn’t willing to do this I’m sure porn industry will be.

06.20.11 at 2:26 pm

Doctor Awesomus

YAYYYYYY

*reads recap of what sounds like a pretty depressing show*

BOOOOOOO

also where did you find that pic of that internet man

06.20.11 at 2:26 pm

Upstate Underdog

*the porn industry…

06.20.11 at 2:32 pm

Ragingape

Thank you so much for a reference to The Foreigner.

Yeah the R-Truth thing is pretty spot on. For as excited as he has been outside the ring his in ring performance hasn’t been getting better and at the end of the day it has to if he’s going to go anywhere. You don’t hide people with the belt.

That Obama stuff sounded so terrible. The McMahons and politics are always terrible together.

06.20.11 at 2:38 pm

Doctor Awesomus

@Ragingape — McMahons + politcs = awful, but that’s a subset of McMahons + comedy = awful. Vince is the guy with no sense of humor who insists on telling jokes. Hey, entertainer guy, entertain me by putting on good wrestling matches, not by making fart noises.

06.20.11 at 2:42 pm

Dave

I’m going to comment more when I’ve watched some of the show (the recap is awesome but doesn’t really inspire me to watch the whole thing) but I will say now that CZW’s ‘Family Dollar employees stab each other with bulb shards’ is amazing.

06.20.11 at 2:43 pm

Juice

Bethesda, MD is the tits. Though I now think you’re rich, seeing as how I could never afford to live in Bethesda, MD.

06.20.11 at 2:50 pm

85

That’s a sweet Moe Howard haircut on Cap’n YouTube up there.

06.20.11 at 2:50 pm

Dodger Dave

1. Great article. Happy to know you didn’t spend the $50. We were probably watching the same feed.

2. The crowd was God awful. It was way more annoying than Faux-bama and Keith Stone. Wait… no Keith Stone walking towards the ring was still way more annoying.

3. Would have preferred Maryse cut the same promo than Barett, because even though I still wouldn’t have cared what the subject was, just watching her walk and talk would have been worth $5 of the $50. (You can call me Sexual Brownie)

4. Thank you for blasting fat ass living in their parents basement guy. At first when I started reading web articles, I wanted to be that guy. But than I realized I wanted a life, and make money, and have sex, and find out you got an std from that check who you thought might have a had something, and than die. (What a terrible path). I’ll stick to reading your article only when I’m on my break at my job.

5. Let’s be honest, this PPV could have been last week’s 3 hour RAW.

5. Last, I want to know, how does one start a ‘#RyderOrRiot’ Riot. Not order a PPV? Or watch RAW? Oh wait, WWE is doing a pretty good job at making us do that right now.

Botchamania RULES! End.

06.20.11 at 3:06 pm

Khris

“I hope Raw features R-Truth calling that kid out and beating the hell out of him. You touch the wrestlers, you gon get GOT.”

Best article punchline yet, I cracked up like a loon.

06.20.11 at 3:12 pm

Paul

Why do I have a feeling this Zack Ryder thing is going to turn out like that Matt Hardy thing, or that Daniel Bryan thing—the people chant like crazy for the WWE to bring them in and/or do something with them, and when they finally do, the people stop caring, because nobody’s being screwed anymore.

06.20.11 at 3:47 pm

mike mulloy

i think i just read somewhere that zeke just became an american citizen. we stole hakeem olajiwon, why can’t we steal him?

06.20.11 at 3:53 pm

Keith

@Paul: I would argue that what Ryder has (a personality), both Hardy and Bryan lacked.

06.20.11 at 4:58 pm

Herb

This needs to happen for SmackDowns.

06.20.11 at 5:22 pm

Patrick

To me the biggest problems with rating matches is the granulated star scale. What makes 3 3/4 better than 3 1/2? Can anyone tell the difference? The way it’s designed is specifically for guys like the one in your picture to feel way more important than they are.

I like reviewing things and am not opposed to any scores, but giving individual matches ratings also ignores the fact that you aren’t buying Undertaker/HBK individually no matter how good it may have been. You watch the show as a whole.

IN CONCLUSION i thought capitol punishment was a 3 out of 5 nyah

06.20.11 at 5:40 pm

Patrick

not gonna lie I wanted the people near the entrance ramp to throw their shit at racist fake president guy and boo him out of the arena, but I guess what he did the prior night wasn’t well-known.

06.21.11 at 6:20 am

Aaric Rivad

Ugh. McMahon’s “clever” attempts at political humor have always made him look like more of an assclown than anything. The bad part is I actually feel more stupid for having watched it.

It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t have much respect for the average wrestling fan’s intelligence, but at least keep the goddamn politics out of it.

06.21.11 at 2:01 pm

Turd Ferguson

I personally could not agree more, if CM Punk leaves, I think I may follow him.

06.22.11 at 3:38 pm

sebastian

I had no idea who Keith Stone was and was dumbfounded by his sudden appearance. I figured he was some kind of famous because the Bellas were attached to him, but my guess was that he was part of some band I didn’t know about. So he’s a dude in a beer commercial? Huh.